The Lady and Tennessee

Lady Maria St. Just’s talent for outrageous mythmaking charmed Tennessee Williams. But in the last decade of her life, when St. Just became the self-appointed keeper of the playwright’s flame, her fantasies assumed a darker role.

Lady Maria St. Just during the 1990 Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”Credit Photograph by Cori Wells Braun.

“He taught me not to lie.”

—Lady Maria St. Just, on Tennessee Williams.

Lady Maria St. Just, who, it was said, was neither a lady nor a saint nor just, died, in England, on February 15, 1994. She was famous for her high spirits and her high-hat ways, which won her many friends and many enemies. She was a resourceful hostess and a good cook, but humble pie was not on her menu. Once, at a dinner party I was attending, she was summoned to the telephone to take an emergency call from Wilbury, her palatial country estate in Wiltshire and the oldest Palladian building in England. When she returned, she was agitated. “The dining-room ceiling has fallen in!” she said. “But God was with us, only the servants were hurt!” Her outrageousness delighted many. Sir John Gielgud, whom she dubbed King Wallah from their theatre tour of the Far East just after the war, was a devoted friend, and so was Gore Vidal. But Maria’s deepest and most longstanding attachment was to Tennessee Williams. She was the model for the fierce survival spirit of Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955). She was also the manic, self-dramatizing, “two-faced” Countess of suspicious pedigree in the 1976 play “This Is (An Entertainment),” whose title at one time went on to include her maiden name—“For Maria Britneva”—in its parentheses. And it was Maria whom Williams named, along with the lawyer John Eastman, as co-trustee of the Rose Williams Trust, established for his adored and lobotomized sister, who is eighty-five this year. As an actress, Maria worked only occasionally, but, because of confusions in Williams’ clumsily drawn will, from 1984 to the end of her life she was cast as a player on the world stage. “She was to be the muse,” Gore Vidal explains. “She was the surviving relic and keeper of the flame. It gave her something to do, which was very sweet of Tennessee. She had no purpose in life.”

From the outset, Maria’s survival was problematic. She was born on July 6, 1921, in St. Petersburg, Russia; but thirteen months later, as she tells it, under the threat of famine, her mother, Mary, escaped to England with Maria and her older brother, Vladimir, leaving their father, Dr. Alexander Britnev, apparently to the hands of the murderous Bolsheviks. “Little Mary . . . was so tiny that no one could believe that she was over a year old,” Mary Britneva writes in “A Stranger in Your Midst,” her autobiography. According to Maria in her own book, “Five O’Clock Angel”—primarily a collection of letters from Williams, which I was briefly engaged to compile, and which Maria ultimately decided to put together herself—she arrived in England with rickets. She remained a tiny figure (she grew to be about five feet tall), with a mane of brown hair, huge gray-brown eyes, and a beaky nose, which she turned up at the world. But another quality also remained—a combination of sadness and terror, which her mother had brought to their new life in England, and which was, along with Maria’s nostalgia for a lost aristocratic world, a large part of her inheritance. English life belied a Russian saying frequently repeated in the Britnev household: “A person is met according to his clothes; but he is escorted according to his brains.” In her autobiography Mary Britneva writes, “Here, you are both met and escorted ‘according to your clothes,’ alas! If a person is badly dressed, or has not acquired the English table-manners—be he ever so brilliant, he is not to be considered—and remains a quantité négligeable.” The appearance of substance was what counted—a bluff posture Maria instinctively adopted as the Britnev family renegotiated its social position in England. Inevitably, the family ambition and the family finances were at odds. In order to send her children to good schools (Maria was, as she said, expensively if not extensively educated), Mary Britneva gave lessons in French and Russian and did line translations of Chekhov.

She was ambitious for her daughter; she recounts shuttling Maria to and from ballet lessons, which Maria attacked with characteristic single-mindedness. When, in 1933, a young dancer with Monte Carlo’s Ballets Russes was found to be under the statutory age of twelve, Maria stepped in. After three seasons, she had to give up dance, because of foot trouble and, she later told Richard Eyre, the head of the Royal National Theatre, because “my bosom was too big.” She transferred her desire to be a star to theatre. She got herself into Michel Saint-Denis’s acting school, and set about making a career.

Maria’s frenetic energy—her ability to act out her anxiety as momentum—was something that Williams teased in “This Is (An Entertainment),” in which the Countess refers to “my spectacular velocity through time.” Maria was driven, and she found a way, by sheer force of personality, to scale both the English aristocracy and the aristocracy of success. Maria spoke loudly and carried a big shtick. “She scared people,” Gore Vidal says. As Maria admitted in a letter to Eyre when she was in her sixties, her roar masked a timidity, which she felt she must conceal. “She had a terrified heart,” the singer-comedienne Paula Laurence says. “Terrified.”

Maria was adamant about living to the limit of her dreams—a hard thing to accomplish at any time, and especially hard in threadbare postwar Britain. But she faced down the world, with what Elia Kazan, in his preface to “Five O’Clock Angel,” calls her “unswervable, desperate grip on what she valued in life.” And, when life didn’t present her with the right scenario, Maria reinvented it. “Never travel to Paris alone; it’s a lovers’ city,” Maria told Dotson Rader, a friend of Tennessee Williams’ and the author of a memoir about him, “Tennessee: Cry of the Heart.” “And I’ll give you another tip. Always have a double bed. Tennessee and I always have a double bed.” Rader recalls that Williams, who had been off in one of his druggy daydreams, suddenly grew alert to the conversation: “Yes, baby, we always have double beds. But they’re always in separate rooms.”

In “Five O’Clock Angel” Maria practices the same kind of narrative trick. Here, in an astonishing act of ventriloquism, she is both the subject of the narrative and the omniscient narrator: “The Tartar imperiousness; the theatrical panache; the dislike of the bourgeois, the stuffy, or the second-rate; above all, the savagely mordant sense of humor: the spirit is the same. It was that spirit which proved enduringly attractive to a man whose own character seemed very different—the American playwright Tennessee Williams.” This transparent mythmaking allows Maria to direct a well-choreographed drama of her idealized self, in which fantasy goes unchallenged and elides effortlessly into the presumption of fact.

Almost everyone, including Williams, was seduced by Maria’s moving portrait of the daughter of noble White Russian émigrés whose paternal grandfather had been physician to “Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna at Tsarskoe Selo,” and whose father had stayed behind in Russia in 1922 to be “shortly afterwards . . . shot by the Soviets.” But recently released K.G.B. files and government papers show that most of this was revised history, of Maria’s fabrication. Maria’s mother was born an English citizen and had been partly educated in England; and Maria’s maternal grandfather, Charles Herbert Bucknall, was English on both sides. (He had been the business partner in St. Petersburg of the French wholesale gem dealers Leo and Georges Sachs—a particularly unappealing legacy to someone of Maria’s anti-Semitic persuasion.) So the Britnevs didn’t actually flee the marauding Bolsheviks; they had English papers. And, according to Russian researchers, the Britnev family line was made up of raznochintsi—intelligentsia who were of plebeian descent. The Britnevs were descended from petty-bourgeois merchants from Kronshtadt, where they owned tugboats and diving equipment and public baths. There was no record of her grandfather’s association with the Tsarina. As for Maria’s father, his K.G.B. file reveals that far from being executed by the Bolsheviks he served in the Red Army. Dr. Britnev was actually executed in 1930, by the Stalinists; then, on April 18, 1969, he was “rehabilitated” by the Communists. Britnev’s link to the Bolsheviks explains the privileges that the Britnevs enjoyed during the particularly brutal Stalinist years of the twenties: they travelled back and forth between Russia and England with relative ease. All this puts paid to Maria’s being a White Russian, or even an Off-White Russian.

Lady Maria St. Just with Tennessee Williams at the 1976 Cannes film festival.

Maria gave credibility to her story, and to her aura of artistic entitlement, by associating with the rich and famous, who acted as a kind of hedge against loss. “She always had to have some adored figure whom she was fiercely loyal to, even when the great figure did not need loyalty, much less fierce loyalty,” Vidal says. In 1945, she attached herself to Sir John Gielgud, who served as her protector and her entrée into the theatre. “I was the dogsbody,” Maria told Interview. “I did everything! I dressed John. . . . I was a terrific favorite of John’s. And consequently everybody hated me because they were jealous.” To win favor, Maria was capable of acts of enormous rashness. Of a 1946 production in which Maria was elevated from understudy to walk-on, Gielgud says, “When Edith Evans, as the consumptive wife in ‘Crime and Punishment,’ coughed too constantly during one of my best scenes, Maria pushed her face in a cushion to keep her quiet. This, as you can imagine, was not well received by the Dame.” Nor was it well received by Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont, who was the panjandrum of H. M. Tennent’s, the powerful West End management company that produced the play. He cancelled Maria’s contract.

“I never thought her much of an actress, but she longed to succeed as one,” Gielgud recalls. Maria had won a place forever in Sir John’s heart but lost her toehold in the mainstream of English theatre. “She wasn’t a good actress,” says the English drama critic Milton Shulman, who was a neighbor of Maria’s. “She was too much a fantasist offstage to be a fantasist onstage.” Maria also had neither the conventional looks nor the reserve for the clipped English-drawing-room drama that was the staple of the West End from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties. She had an artistic temperament, but she couldn’t produce art. She was up against it. Then she met Williams and hitched her wagon to his star.

The romance of the Williams-Britneva friendship is built on the cornerstone of their first meeting. In her story, Maria casts herself as an ingénue of “eighteen or nineteen.” (She was just shy of twenty-seven.) She and Williams met at a dinner at Gielgud’s home on June 11, 1948. Maria told Dick Cavett on his talk show, “I was invited to this wonderful party. Noël Coward playing the piano. Vivien Leigh, Larry Olivier, the most wonderful people. . . . I suddenly saw in the corner this crumpled little man, very alone—one red sock and one blue sock. I thought he must be another understudy.” Since Gielgud was directing the début of “The Glass Menagerie” in London, it’s hardly likely that Williams, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947), went unnoticed at the party. But there were a few things that assuredly did go unnoticed by Maria. The Oliviers were not there: according to their biographers, they were in Australia most of the year. And it must have been the blithe spirit of Noël Coward who was tinkling the ivories, since Coward himself was in New York, meeting with his publishers, and didn’t arrive back in England until nearly two weeks later.

Gore Vidal, who hung out with Williams in Paris after the playwright bolted from the prospect of a disastrous London opening, starring Helen Hayes as Amanda Wingfield, believes that the two must have met several weeks later, at a party given by Binkie Beaumont. But, wherever the meeting took place, it made boon companions of Maria, Vidal, and Williams. Vidal recalls the three of them walking along the Strand the following day: “Maria ate and ate. She and her mother were poor. They were still on ration books. She had some toffees, and she gave me one. I had a pivot tooth—a false tooth—which immediately came out. Riotous laughter from Maria. Could’ve killed her. The three of us became friends. And then she attached herself.”

Williams recognized in Maria what Elia Kazan called “a symbol, an archetype, of the ‘rebellious spirit’ at bay.” He knew an embattled romantic when he saw one. Thomas Lanier Williams, who was ten years older than Maria, had also invented himself as an artist, adopting the name Tennessee Williams in 1938. By rights, he should have called himself Mississippi Williams, since until his family moved to St. Louis, in 1918, he’d been raised in a series of Episcopal rectories where his grandfather was pastor, most of them in Mississippi. But the name Tennessee evoked the lost heroic heritage of his hated, hard-drinking father—a travelling salesman called C. C. Williams, whose ancestors were among the founders of that state. Williams shared with Maria a difficult beginning (in his case, diphtheria and kidney infection at the age of six); the trauma of dislocation (the shift to St. Louis was the alienation around which “The Glass Menagerie” was built); and a sense, no matter how well disguised, of being under siege. Williams had been writing since his youth but had only just broken through when he met Maria; the purity of her aspirations and the poverty of her circumstances moved him. In 1949, he wrote from London to his friends the writer Donald Windham and the actor Sandy Campbell:

She detests London and has fallen out completely with the Beaumont office so she has no prospect of work here. Only a television job, three weeks rehearsal and entire salary amounts to one hundred dollars. (One performance.) Seems to have no interesting friends here, nobody she likes much and her family is quite poor, except for an aunt who treats her rather coolly. Poor child.

Maria played the devoted, adorable (and needy) girl; Williams was the benevolent sugar daddy, always ready to spring for vacation tickets, hotels, loans, jewelry, even an occasional dress or fur. “I felt I was in a state of grace when I was with him,” Maria later said, and she was: protected by the big magic of Williams’ talent and renown from a world whose security, in her case, had a habit of collapsing.

To a woman of Maria’s overweening social and artistic ambitions, an important marriage was crucial, and one of the first men she set her cap at was Williams himself. “She was madly in love with Tenn, madly, madly in love,” says the journalist Harriet Van Horne, who knew Maria in her vagabond days in the fifties, in New York, where she was pursuing her stalled acting career and cooking supper in a one-room apartment for, among others, William Faulkner and Marlon Brando. (Maria was said to have bedded Brando, and in her twilight years she was a staunch friend to members of the star’s family during their legal troubles.) Although there is no evidence that Maria and Williams had sex, Van Horne heard the sound of genuine passion in Maria’s talk about him: “Her description—‘Tennessee is so tanned. His head is like a brown nut. I just love to run my fingers through his hair.’ You don’t say that unless you’ve got a physical attraction.” Maria wrote in her diary, “I do love Tennessee and don’t think there is anyone alive who is more sweet and gentle, kind and generous and so full of talent. . . . His companionship and support are what I value now most in my life.” Maria went to a psychotherapist about her relationship with Williams, and, despite sensational evidence to the contrary, wanted to believe that he was a lapsed heterosexual. “To go around saying Tennessee wasn’t a faggot is madness,” Vidal says. But at times Maria went around saying even more than that. “She called me up and said, ‘I’ve got to see you right away,’ ” Arthur Miller says. “She showed up and she said, ‘Tennessee and I want to get married’—not are going to get married. ‘What do you think?’ I was floored. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re both of the same mind?’ I sensed a large element of fantasy in it. She was playing some kind of role, flying around the room and being extremely romantic and excited, like a fourteen-year-old girl. All I could do was stall and think whether I’d heard right. I think she wanted me to talk to Tennessee and get him to marry her.”

“She liked to fuck,” says Paula Laurence, who, with her husband, the producer Charles Bowden, was among Maria’s best American friends. But, Laurence adds, “she didn’t throw it around. She had to be sure what kind of a bargain she was striking with it.” In 1951, Maria had an abortion, and Williams wrote in a letter to his good friend Paul Bigelow that she was suffering “the immemorial trouble of warm-hearted ladies.” (Williams went on to say, “Keep this under your Borsalino, pet! It is not supposed to be anything more exotic than ulcers.”) But the next year, almost to the week, Williams was piping a happier tune, to his agent, Audrey Wood, about “our little secret”: Maria had been having an affair with Williams’ patrician American publisher, James Laughlin, known as Jay—the handsome millionaire who had founded New Directions. Williams wrote:

We left Maria in Paris, impecunious and gay and charming as ever . . . not too depressed over the fact that our friend Jay has apparently resumed his American affair. She makes me think of a joke about a Brooklyn “queen” whose lover had gone to sea. A friend said how are you feeling, and the response was: “I am inconsolable! I’ve only had five sailors since supper!”

Maria was seeking consolation with John Huston when I left. I introduced them on the set of “Moulin Rouge.” . . . I had not been here a day when I received a wire from Maria. “AT IT LIKE KNIVES. HUSTON A STEAMING HOT CUP OF TEA. WANT TO STAY IN PARIS. CALL ME.” . . . I do hope she gets a job out of this, which was the original purpose of the meeting, and not just another one of her peculiar misadventures. She says she “always forgets to be careful,” whatever that means, and nature seems determined to make use of her!

By 1954, Maria had managed to hook Laughlin: their engagement was announced in the London Times. But Laughlin got cold feet, and several months later broke it off. This was an enormous humiliation for Maria. According to her, it was her extravagance in buying Laughlin eight silk ties that spooked him. “ ‘My God! What are you going to do with all my money?’ ” she quotes Laughlin as saying in “Five O’Clock Angel,” which is dedicated to him. She goes on, “I was genuinely surprised. ‘Why, have you got any?—I’ll spend it, of course!’ ” Maria knew perfectly well that Laughlin was wealthy. A press release she later composed with the help of a New York P.R. man refers to her having “broken her engagement to a multimillionaire steel heir.” Williams wrote to Laughlin, implicitly suggesting that he settle money on Maria for “disappointment as a result of being discarded like this, in such a public fashion.”

What had terrified Laughlin was Maria’s essentially volatile nature. “I think you are one of the world’s more attractive girls,” he admitted to her in his Dear Maria letter. “But I’m also afraid of you—afraid of how you might wreck my life with all that mis-directed energy pouring out of you like a giant Russian dynamo.” In a five-page handwritten letter to Williams he spelled out his fears more directly. “She is so strong-willed and dominating and, to use her phrase, ‘makes such rows’ when I assert myself against her wishes,” he wrote. “If anything, in the years I have known her, she has become more vital and active, more ready to get caught up in the interests and doings of people who do not really fit into the center of her picture.” He added, “I doubt if she is really ‘crushed,’ as you say. I don’t think you really understand what a vitality she has. Nothing could or would crush her.”

On July 25, 1956, Maria married Peter Grenfell, Lord St. Just, the son of Edward Grenfell, who had been made a baron in 1935. Grenfell was the English banking partner of J. P. Morgan, with whom he had formed Morgan Grenfell & Co. Peter, who suffered from a manic depression that led to frequent bouts of uncontrollable shaking and crying, had a love of country pursuits (shooting, sailing) and of the ballet and the opera. His mother, the dowager, was a patron of the arts, and entertained Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at Wilbury; as a child, Peter was encouraged to admire all things Russian. He was a handsome man with a long, Slavic-looking face. Mark Birley, an old friend of Lord Peter’s and a godson of the Dowager’s, says, “There was even a story that Peter’s real father was one of the dancers at their slightly bohemian weekends.” Maria not only was a link to Peter’s past but, in her promises to help cure him, was perceived as a link to his future. “He thought she could help him,” Bobby Henderson, a trustee of Lord Peter’s estate, says. “She had an effect on him. She bemused him. Her amusingness distracted him. It was an escape. He certainly had strong feelings for her. He seemed to want to be near her; and then he didn’t.” Lord Peter’s love/hate for Maria was apparent from the outset. “He bolted from outside Harvey Nichols when she was buying gloves for the wedding,” Margaret Anne Stuart, St. Just’s frequent companion in the late fifties, says. “He went into a clinic. He called her up and apologized—this is what he told me—and the next time he saw her the marriage took place.”

Maria’s New York press release told a Cinderella story with a twist: that she was sacrificing the promise of a big career for the promise of a big bankroll. “Thus, Maria said goodbye to her friend Tennessee Williams’ hope of having her play the lead in his next play,” the release said. “The poor but proud British actress had been warming up here taking Southern accent lessons on Tennessee’s orders.” Poverty was now something to joke about. The lead paragraph quoted her as saying, “I’m probably the only girl to ever wed a peer, in a dress from Gimbel’s basement, a dollar hat, with a ribbon from Woolworth’s, standing in a pair of ten cent shoes!”

According to Clarissa Heald, a family friend of the Grenfells, Maria had met Peter through her paternal aunt, who worked as a paid companion to the Dowager after the first Lord St. Just’s death, in 1941. Maria, in other words, had been belowstairs and was now marrying the lord of the manor. The Dowager, who later referred to her as “the little Bolshevik” and who was, in turn, hated by Maria and dismissed by her as “really rather common, you know,” began by putting a good face on her son’s marriage. “I believe you will bring love and salvation to Peter,” she wrote to Maria at the time of the wedding. “He has suffered cruelly, and his great courage in not turning to drink or drugs has amazed the doctors.” Peter St. Just turned to drink soon enough, but his position and his problems were on a scale that appealed to his new wife’s grandiosity. According to the press release, St. Just had greeted Maria when she arrived in England for a European holiday with the daughter of the head of M.C.A., Jean Stein, and said, “Darling, will you marry me?” In fact, Maria had taken Peter St. Just out of the sanitarium to marry him. They spent their wedding night at Claridge’s, but they had a furious row, and the next day Lord Peter ran off for a fortnight. “He was in kind of strange shape,” Stein recalls, and goes on to explain Maria’s impulse. “To be Lady St. Just and to have some money. Are you kidding? She had nothing. Desperate. And to have that beautiful home in the country and to be legitimate.” But as long as the Dowager was alive Maria was only a visitor to Wilbury, and had to bide her time to claim it.

Vidal remembers Peter St. Just as “a great charmer when he was in good form.” But Maria’s talk about her husband was increasingly bitter, and her bitterness has led Vidal to conclude that—despite Williams’ public utterances—she was not the model for Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” “She probably got him to say it—I mean, Tennessee would say anything,” Vidal says. “Maggie was in love with Brick; Maria was not in love with Peter, to put it simply. And Maggie desired Brick physically, which Maria did not Peter St. Just.”

Their union proved a marriage of inconvenience. “He came back to her often when he was ill,” Lady Stuart says. “But when he was healthy she didn’t see him for dust.” Though the marriage produced two children—Natasha and Katherine—St. Just also fathered at least one and possibly two illegitimate children. And the Dowager treated Maria badly; even the implicit promise of generosity proved false. (In her letters, Maria frequently drew a witch on a broomstick next to the Dowager’s name.) Lord Peter and Lady Maria were put on a minimal allowance by his trustees. “Maria was living in a tiny, tiny flat with her two babies in London,” says Harriet Van Horne, who visited her there in the late fifties. “They bought the house in Gerald Road for Maria, but they would not put it in Maria’s name. It was in the name of the girls. She lived there by grace and favor.”

Maria tried to put a droll spin on her husband’s frequent breakdowns. “Oh, Peter’s in the bin again,” Van Horne remembers her saying. “He loves it. He’s learned to make ashtrays.” Van Horne explains, “Other people had messy marriages. She didn’t. She had an unfortunate husband who was a little mad.” Maria always displayed what Williams called, in reference to another disenchanted romantic, Chance Wayne, “that terrible stiff-necked pride of the defeated.”

Maria projected onto Tennessee Williams all the passion and romantic idealism that were absent in her marriage. He was an improbable St. George who came to her aid in the increasingly frequent times of separation and tribulation. “She used to find herself without any money,” the journalist Drusilla Beyfus says. “I remember what Maria told me when I went to stay at Wilbury and commented on the pretty wallpaper—William Morris wallpaper, I think. She said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Tennessee’s paid for it. Every time I lie in bed and look at it, I thank God for Tennessee.’ ” Where St. Just shrugged off her attentions, Williams welcomed them; where St. Just viewed her as a burden to be endured, Williams, from his transatlantic vantage point, saw her as a character to be enjoyed; where St. Just abused her with occasional outbursts of violence (Maria miscarried a child after one fight, she told a friend), Williams, always the courtly Southern gent, was solicitous of her, at least to her face. Lord Peter’s depression led him down unproductive byways, but Williams turned his suffering into something public, something that could be, as he says in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” unveiled: “a sculpture, almost heroic.” Increasingly, in Maria’s mind Williams became the husband manqué, and she was the unkissed bride. “It was a friendship,” she writes in the introduction to “Five O’Clock Angel,” betraying the unabashed and barmy depth of her romantic fantasy, “that they managed successfully to keep private for over thirty years.”

Maria’s worship at the altar of Williams’ talent paid off in a number of appearances in his plays: a walk-on role in the London production of “Summer and Smoke” in 1951; an Off-Broadway stab at Blanche in “Streetcar” in 1955, about which Brooks Atkinson said, “Maria Brit-Neva, an English actress, is not able to express the inner tensions of that haunted gentlewoman”; a cameo in “Suddenly Last Summer” in 1959, as the mute, demented woman with a doll in the opening sequence who undergoes a lobotomy; and bit parts in “Orpheus Descending” at the Royal Court in 1959 and in the London and Vienna productions of “The Red Devil Battery Sign” in 1977. Sometimes Williams tried to temper Maria’s theatrical ambitions. “You must be realistic about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do in theatre,” he wrote her in 1952, spurning her plea to play Esmeralda in “Camino Real.” But at other times he championed her cause. “Doll,” Williams wrote her in 1954, “I have mobilized the city in an all-out campaign to find ‘WORK FOR MARIA!’ ” Such was Williams’ thralldom to Maria that by the nineteen-seventies he was referring to them both ironically as “her Ladyship and slave.”

“She was so extraordinary about weaving her way into people’s lives,” Paula Laurence says. “Before you knew it, you were entirely surrounded. But it was done with tremendous affection, the most flattering kind of interest, outrageous presents, and loving attention. How could you not want that?” Certainly the distracted and disorganized Tennessee Williams did. “I am quite incapable of learning the relative values of all these crazy coins, bobs, half crowns, ten shillings, quids, etc.,” he wrote to Audrey Wood from London in 1948, just before Maria came into his life. “When Margo”—the director Margo Jones, who also adored Williams—“deserts me I shall be in total chaos!” Maria made herself indispensable. She sent him gifts, did his laundry, and dispensed a lot of brusque maternal straight talk (“Read, mark, and inwardly digest”). In fact, Maria had the physical outline and all the emotional attributes of Williams’ mother, Edwina, who was also petite, domineering, strong-willed, and filled with a nostalgia for a vanished aristocratic heritage. The unconscious authority and appeal that this resemblance gave Maria helps to explain the strange power she seemed to exert over Williams.

Maria also turned Williams’ social life into a fiesta. The actor Keith Baxter, who appeared with Maria in “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” says, “That’s one of the things Tenn found absolutely thrilling about her: that she was the life force. Where Maria was, there was energy; and Tenn’s energies were very much depleted.” She brought incidental comedy to Williams’ melancholy existence. “In a single night & morning the Lady St. Pig has made an indelible impression on Buffalo & especially the management and players of the Arena Theatre,” he wrote to Gore Vidal in 1973, in a joint letter with Maria. “With our plane booking at 2 p.m., she decided at 11:30 to go see Niagara Falls and it took a taxi driver, myself, and the assistant hotel manager to convince her the project was unrealistic time-wise. It was with noticeable reluctance that she returned me the fare.” (Here Maria adds, “He hadn’t given me enough anyway. Scrooge.”)

From the outset, Maria’s hold on Williams was noticed with amusement by his friends. Donald Windham wrote in his memoirs, “She is one of the few people who, with a combination of flattery and mockery, good humor and slyness, can sometimes cajole Tennessee into seeing his absurdities and dropping them. At the same time, she consolidates herself in his good will by mischievous endorsements of the desires he wants to be encouraged in.” Even toward the end of Williams’ life, after the sixties, which he called the Stoned Age, Maria—although she deplored his homosexual world and his drugged haze—kept control over him by providing what he wanted. “She was supplying or trying to supply him not only with boys . . . but with drugs,” claims Bruce Smith, a P.R. man whose memoir “Costly Performances” is an account of his friendship with Williams between 1979 and 1981. Smith refused to stay with Williams after discovering a set of needles in a brown paper bag in Williams’ apartment. In an unpublished passage from his memoir, Smith writes of cornering Maria and telling her, “I’ve seen the needles in this morning’s package. Let’s not play holier than thou,” and he adds, “Her eyes widened and she stepped back into the kitchen.” Dotson Rader, who was no stranger to drugs, and occasionally stayed in Williams’ Key West home, also “became convinced that she was acting as his pusher.” Rader goes on:

He couldn’t get Seconal. The doctors wouldn’t give him pills . . . I became convinced that she was giving him the pills because whenever she would show up he’d suddenly have them. . . . I thought she was getting prescriptions in her name and giving him the stuff. I got really angry two days before the opening of “Clothes” because he was in no shape. We all had dinner at Vas Voglis’s, who was another piece of work, and Tennessee was with her. He’d been with her all day long, and he was absolutely stoned. He’d missed a rehearsal. She was sitting there smug. I suddenly started attacking her. I said, “You filthy cunt! You’re pushin’ drugs on him! You’re killing him, you son-of-a bitch!” To which she got terribly British, terribly upper-class. She turned to Tennessee and said, “Aren’t you going to defend me, darling, against this ruffian?” I said I was going back to the hotel, and that anything I found I was going to flush down the toilet. And if he had drugs again, I said I was going to call the police and get her deported. . . . I think that’s one of the reasons why he was always so happy to see her. . . . She facilitated his addictions.

Another one of Williams’ addictions was the contact high of celebrity. And Maria acted as his champion and protector, facing down the world for him when increasingly he was too drugged or drunk to hold his head up. Once, after attending the opening of Martin Sherman’s “Bent” (1979) on Broadway, they went backstage with Rader to see its star, Richard Gere. He was slumped in his jockey shorts at the dressing table when Williams held out his hand in congratulation. “Gere just stares at Tennessee and won’t take his hand,” Rader, who was no fan of Maria’s, recalls. “I must say I was proud of her. ‘Don’t you know who this is, young man? Don’t you know who’s extending his hand to you? It’s Tennessee Williams, the world’s greatest playwright. How dare you not take his hand!’ ”

The power of celebrity emboldened and even sanctioned Maria’s tyrannical nature. “She tried to kill me,” alleges Williams’ younger brother, Dakin, referring to Maria’s pushing him off a catwalk at New York’s Lyceum Theatre after the opening of “Out Cry” (1973), when Dakin was in disfavor with Williams, in large part for having him institutionalized in 1969. “There was a two-foot-wide aperture in the railing,” Dakin says. “Seventy-five feet onto concrete. The lady maneuvered me right in front of that opening. She said, ‘Step back, Dakin,’ and she shoved me with both hands on my shoulders. . . . Luckily for me, there was a spiral staircase out of sight beneath this opening; and, of course, my arms were flailing about as I was falling and I caught hold of it.” In 1979, Dakin saw Maria at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, where Williams was to receive a Kennedy Center Honors Award. Dakin recalls, “I came up to her and said, ‘Now, Maria, why did you do that?’ referring to the attempt she made on my life. She said, ‘Well, Dakin, you were behaving so beastly.’ My brother asked her about it, and said, ‘You might have killed my brother Dakin.’ And she said to Tennessee, ‘Oh, that was the intention, luv.’ ”

Williams, who was inclined to be conciliatory except when liquored up, was both amazed and appalled by Maria’s forthrightness. “You seem to say all the things that discreet people only think,” he wrote to her in 1949. “I do most earnestly advise and beseech you to curb it, like the fancy little dogs on Fifth Avenue.” But Maria couldn’t resist. With a few accurate verbal strokes, she could winkle out the defining aspect of a personality. “No-neck monsters,” the first phrase of “Cat,” was her coinage, and she invented a whole lexicon of mischievous nicknames to amuse Williams. His regal agent, Audrey Wood, was Lady Mandarin; his jowly friend Carson McCullers was Choppers; the suave Berlin-born agent Robert Lantz was Mitt Schlag. In the early fifties, when Maria had a studio apartment in New York, Drusilla Beyfus remembers coming to meet her for the first time, only to find a bloodstained handkerchief and a note pinned to the door. “Suicide upstairs—Be with you soon,” it read. Beyfus says, “I never knew if there actually was a suicide. We all went out for a jolly dinner afterward, and it was never mentioned again. I felt as if I was in a Chekhov play.” The playwright John Guare, who visited Maria at Wilbury, says, “You understood why Tennessee must have liked her. Every moment was high melodrama. Completely manic humor. All good guys and bad guys. She lived by her nose. She lived on instinct. Dangerously. She would size people up in a second and be totally wrong or totally right.”

Over the years, Williams took increasing pleasure in aiming Maria’s grapeshot vitriol at various imposing friends and watching the showdown. When Maria complained of being unable to understand Brando in his definitive portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in “Streetcar,” Williams took her backstage to tell him so. He imported Maria to Florida under the assumed name Miss Bow to watch Tallulah Bankhead make a hash of Blanche in a 1955 production that was being tried out at the Coconut Grove Theatre before coming to New York, and for which Maria had unsuccessfully auditioned as Stella. It was a recipe for mayhem. “From the moment Miss Bankhead saw Maria, she would have none of her,” Sandy Campbell writes in “B,” a privately printed epistolary account of the production, in which he had a small part. “Tenn is licking his lips with the prospect of an encounter between B and her.” Williams, who was secretly disgruntled with Bankhead’s performance, brought Miss Bow to the opening-night party (“Maria, naturally . . . talking violently against B’s performance”). Inevitably, the next day there was some sniping between Bankhead and Williams, who, having hypocritically praised her, now told her she’d given a bad performance. Campbell, who was present, recounts the scene:

“And you had the nerve to say that after getting down on your knees to me in the dressing room,” B said.

“Are you calling me a hypocrite?”. . .

“And bringing that bitch, Maria, to the party is shocking,” B said.

Tenn, standing up: “My dear, I do not have to stand for this anymore. Calling . . . my best friend a black bitch is more than I can take!” And he marched out.

“She would give him backbone,” Gore Vidal says of Maria’s role in Williams’ life and career. “He would rather slide off to the nearest bar and forget about it. He had a thing of really talking very obscenely, and it got worse as he got older. He’d be in perfectly respectable mixed company, and he’d start in, ‘Oh, I saw this boy on the Strand, and he had . . .’ The whole room would be riveted. And Maria’s voice could be heard: ‘Oh, Tennessee, do shut up!’ I told Maria that should be the title of her book. Sometimes he liked it; but he was a perfectly shrewd strategist of his career, and there were times when he would tell her to shut up and stop it. And she would immediately become as meek as a lamb.”

Maria’s caustic wit effectively eroded several of Williams’ allegiances. It also created a sense of collusion that passed for intimacy. “Once she got the inkling that Tenn was beginning to get suspicious of someone, she would pee in his ear,” Rader says. Maria apparently played a part in stoking the paranoia about Audrey Wood that led, in 1971, to Williams’ final split with his agent of thirty-two years. Maria had taken a dislike to Wood from her earliest days in New York, when she was made to wait in Wood’s outer office, at I.C.M., to receive a weekly stipend of twenty-five dollars that Williams had arranged for her. According to the agent Bridget Aschenberg, who worked with Wood, Maria was the only person who ever made the steely doyenne of American theatrical agents cry. “It was some kind of terrible scene with Tenn and her and Lady Maria, in the dressing room,” Aschenberg says of Williams’ tirade at Wood, which occurred backstage during “Out Cry.” “She came into the office the next day. She was wearing dark glasses. She said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She hated this woman. She hated her.” Later, in 1979, the agent Mitch Douglas took over the representation of Williams, and Wood would sometimes stick her head in his office door to inquire, “How’s he doing?” Douglas recalls her popping in one morning: “ ‘Well, dear, have you met Maria yet?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ And she says, ‘Well, watch her, dear, she’s a bitch.’ Audrey didn’t say things like that.” (The first time Douglas heard from Maria, she phoned to say, “Mitch, I am in Tennessee’s apartment, and it’s filthy. The floors are filthy. The windows are even dirtier.” Douglas recalls, “I said, ‘Maria, I don’t do floors.’ ”) It was Wood’s prowess as both critic and confidante for Williams that galled Maria, and which she felt compelled to trash in “Five O’Clock Angel.” She writes, “The manuscript Tennessee had sent to Audrey, to which she had reacted so negatively, was a new play—‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ Audrey could not understand its plot, which Maria had to explain to her.” The claim is dizzying in its absurdity. “Cat” is dedicated to Wood, and she certainly understood the plays; she made criticisms of them that Williams incorporated into his final scripts. “I’m glad you wrote me so candidly about it,” Williams said in a letter to Wood about her notes to “Orpheus Descending” (1957). “Your reaction to a script means much more to me than anyone else’s.”

In revising history, Maria was revising her place in Williams’ story, which since the publication of his “Memoirs,” in 1975, had been a bone of contention between them. As Maria frequently told the press, she had thrown “Memoirs” in the wastebasket. She was offended, she said, by his louche tales. She was even more offended by Williams’ making a scant eleven mentions of her, calling her “an occasional actress,” and promising the reader “I will write more about Maria later.” The most memorable remark about her in the book is that “the lady is afflicted with folie de grandeur.” Maria put the screws to Williams, and his apology was a few typewritten pages about their relationship, which he promised would be published in the British edition. In the end, they were published in “Five O’Clock Angel.” Williams wrote, “In the American edition of my memoirs, this richly sustaining attachment was, for some reason, reduced by the editors to the point where it seemed to be little more than an acquaintance, practically unexplained.” But had the St. Just-Williams amitié amoureuse really been blue-pencilled out by others? “The answer is no,” Kate Medina, the editor of the book, says. Williams himself had virtually left Maria out of the official story of his life. She had absorbed him, but had Williams, as she claims in “Five O’Clock Angel,” absorbed her? “I suppose in a way he had,” Gore Vidal says. “Although he was a very solitary cat. He appreciated, to a degree, what she did for him, which was just kind of looking after him. But I don’t think he ever had any affection for anybody.”

Maria Britneva in 1948, the year she met Tennessee Williams. He knew an embattled romantic when he saw one—and let her re-create her life through their relationship.

When, at the end of his life, Peter St. Just was very ill and Maria was his devoted attendant, Harriet Van Horne remembers asking her, “Suppose both Peter and Tenn were terminally ill? At whose bedside would you sit?” Maria replied, “Well, Tennessee’s, darling, of course.” As it happened, Williams died in 1983, a year and a half before Peter St. Just. Over the remaining years of her life, Maria frequently asked Paula Laurence, “What do you think? If Tennessee had lived, how would this have ended?” Laurence explains, “She wanted us to reassure her that he would be with her somehow. Maybe not in a legal marriage, but together. You felt so sad about that. ‘Get real, girl.’ Jesus!”

Maria’s fantasy of being Williams’ widow and her own artistic frustrations coalesced in her role as co-trustee of the Rose Williams Trust, which accounted for the majority of Williams’ estate, amounting to five million dollars. She did an imaginative job as Rose’s caretaker—frequently visiting her in the sanitarium where she lived, and furnishing her new apartment there with a canopied bed, white wicker furniture, and flowered pillows. “It’s a room for a teen-ager,” says Laurence, whose husband helped Maria look after Rose. “It’s the room she never had.”

Williams, who built a shrine to Rose in his Key West house, enshrined her memory in many plays, perhaps most notably in the part of Laura in “The Glass Menagerie” (1945). Like Laura, Rose exhibited an almost morbid shyness, which was connected to the repression of sexual feeling in their mother’s puritanical household and to their father’s tyrannical behavior. As Rose reached adulthood, her behavior grew increasingly erratic. She had delusions of being murdered and poisoned. She became abusive and violent. (She once had to be stopped from carrying a kitchen knife to a psychiatric appointment.) After a psychiatrist warned that Rose might murder her father, the family institutionalized her; they later consented to a lobotomy. Unlike Williams, for whom work provided “outer oblivion and inner violence,” Rose had no way of exorcising pain. Her outer violence was transformed through the operation to inner oblivion.

In her care of Rose, Maria was appropriately warm and dutiful, but in her extracurricular involvement in Williams’ literary affairs she was fanatical. She took to the job like a moth to light, and held sway with a ferocity that even her solicitor, the legendary Sir Arnold Goodman, told her was out of bounds. He writes in his memoir, “Tell Them I’m On My Way” (1993), “She was engaged in vigorous battles to maintain the integrity of various productions, despite my constant remonstrances that it is no part of her duty as a trustee to engage in casting the play. However, remonstrances to Maria are about as futile as persuading a charging bull of the error of its ways.” Because the trust was vested with the copyrights to the plays, Maria’s role increasingly allowed her to give or deny permission to produce them, and to insist in other ways on her idea of Williams—and of herself—for posterity. Her imperialism extended even to Williams’ grave, marked—improbably, since he was an Episcopalian—by a Russian Orthodox cross.

The only authorized voice about Williams was to be Maria’s. As she writes in the penultimate paragraph of “Five O’Clock Angel,” again giving her fantasy the ring of fact, “Tennessee’s two great loves had been his work and his sister Rose. In his Will, he entrusted the care of both to Maria.” How well she succeeded in purveying this myth could be seen in her obituaries. “THE ARISTOCRATIC HELLCAT WHO LOVED TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,” the Evening Standard said. The Guardian spelled out her story in calmer detail: “She was Williams’s closest woman friend, and her almost familial devotion was acknowledged upon his death, when she was named as his literary executor. His artistic heritage could not have been entrusted to a more vigilant administrator.”

Obituaries and her pronouncements to the contrary, Maria became Tennessee Williams’ literary executor only by default. “Maria was never named as literary executor,” the estate’s other co-trustee, John Eastman, says. “Tennessee and I talked about it. He said, ‘My only concern is Rose.’ ” And in at least one regard Williams’ will is explicit in its intention to separate the co-trustees, who had fiduciary power, from the people evaluating his literary remains; in a codicil to his will he designated Harvard University to be the sole arbiter of such judgment.

The will had been the focus of much ambivalent feeling between Maria and Williams. “She was always whining about money,” Rader says. “About her future. She was getting old. He’d say, ‘Oh, baby, don’t worry. You’re in the will.’ ” But, Rader notes, “Tennessee was always telling people they were in his will.” Maria argued with Williams—and even fell out with him for a number of years, friends say—over being made an heiress. This estrangement accounts for the meagre twenty letters from Williams to Maria between 1959 and 1967 that appear in “Five O’Clock Angel.” “Ultimately, money was the root of her evil,” Paula Laurence says. “She loved money. Money was all tied up with security, with love, with emotions.” With a large estate to manage, two daughters in private school, and an erratic husband, financial security was always an issue for Maria. She wanted Williams to leave her a percentage of the royalties to one of his major plays—a gesture he’d made to other important caretakers, such as his mother, who got half the royalties from “The Glass Menagerie,” and his great friend and lover Frank Merlo, who got a percentage of “The Rose Tattoo.” When Williams died, he left Maria the proceeds of his rarely performed “The Two Character Play” (as “Out Cry” was later titled)—which in fiscal terms was as impudent a joke as Shakespeare’s leaving his wife the “second best bed.” Williams also made Maria’s co-trusteeship—and the not insubstantial stipend that eventually came with it—dependent on Rose’s life span. According to the will, when Rose died the co-trustees’ role and their salary and benefits would stop. It was a guarantee, beyond Maria’s avowed devotion to Rose, that proper care would be taken.

In the most literal sense, the trustees fulfilled their mandate—which was to increase the economic value of the trust. “We did that,” Eastman says, “led by Maria.” In 1984, Maria and Eastman began to assist the will’s executor—the Southeast Banks of Florida—in administering the estate, and in the next five years Williams’ earnings jumped from $349,000 to $545,000 a year; between 1989 and 1993, they rose to $809,000 a year. But Maria, who had no academic training and no understanding of how a literary reputation is made or sustained, encouraged productions and discouraged discussion. Williams’ royalties went up, but the dialogue about his work went down. Scholars were refused the right to quote from Williams’ unpublished writings, or even to Xerox material from Williams’ early papers, which occupy a hundred boxes at the University of Texas at Austin. “These are the people who keep Williams’ reputation alive by writing about him and by teaching him in their classes,” the librarian who oversees the collection, Cathy Henderson, wrote to Maria in 1992. “Denying this group of users the option of doing at least a portion of their research from photocopies discourages critical attention and sets the stage for there being less of an audience for his works.” And today, more than a decade after Williams’ death, his letters have not been edited; his journals have not been published; there are no standard editions of his great plays; his private library is unavailable; and no publishing schedule has been organized for his unpublished work. (Maria cancelled the New Directions publication of “Something Cloudy, Something Clear,” in 1993, presumably because of its homosexual content.)

Since Lady St. Just’s social and public persona was an elaborate house of cards, any scrutiny was a threat; and Maria was determined to influence the choice of a Williams biographer. “His personal image had been appallingly tarnished,” she said of the spate of inadequately researched memoirs about Williams—including his own—that have emphasized drink, drugs, and homosexual promiscuity. “I couldn’t bear this image for posterity.” She considered a number of writers. I myself was approached—not by Maria but through an agent—and decided against working on a Williams biography, because of family commitments. Maria also approached several literary biographers, such as A. Scott Berg, Judith Thurman, and Margot Peters, who had the kind of reputation that could add lustre to a Williams enterprise. But, ultimately, literary excellence and Maria’s terms proved to be at odds. No reputable writer would give five to ten years to a project only to abdicate control to a third party.

Gore Vidal says, “I explained to her, ‘All you care about is how you come out of the story. Any biographer will give you the right to censor anything about yourself, since the biography is not of Maria but of Tennessee.’ ” This, of course, was the galling problem.

Maria did make an arrangement with Margot Peters, the author of biographies of Charlotte Brontë and the Barrymores, and between 1989 and 1991 Peters worked on the project. It did not go smoothly. “She definitely wanted to vet the manuscript,” Peters says. “I just kept telling her, ‘Maria, this is my own biography. You’re giving me the rights, but it’s mine. I can’t work if you’re going to vet the manuscript.’ There were some things that she wouldn’t even let me examine. First I could use quotes, then perhaps I couldn’t.” The project was off; then it was on again. Finally, the two women parted ways in a bitter transatlantic phone call. “I would never trust you with him,” Peters recalls Maria telling her. Peters still seethes at the memory. “You have ruined Tennessee Williams!” she screamed at Maria. “You’re ruining him! You’re ruining his reputation! You’re ruining scholarship for him! I wouldn’t work on him or with you for anything in this world!” And she slammed the telephone down.

Maria, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, adopted the former British Prime Minister’s tactic when faced with opposition to her will: she took no prisoners. She boasted to Virginia Spencer Carr, who has a contract with Scribners—now on hold—to write a biography of Williams, that she had already managed to “squash two” biographies, and then ventured to make it a hat trick by telling Carr that she would not be given permission to quote from Williams’ work. As both Peters and Carr discovered, obliteration, not negotiation, was Maria’s style. She had never mentioned even to the “authorized” Peters that for five years prior to his death Williams had coöperated on a biography with the theatre producer Lyle Leverich. Leverich, who was planning a two-part biography, possessed two letters from Williams naming him as the authorized biographer and allowing him “full access to my private correspondence and journals.”

Williams first met Leverich in 1976, when Leverich was managing a small San Francisco theatre called The Showcase and successfully produced “The Two Character Play.” The following year, Leverich wrote a long letter to the New York Times in response to a wrongheaded review by Robert Brustein of “Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940–1965”—published in 1977, it remains the best book about Williams—and Williams wrote to thank him for his support. The next year, over dinner, Leverich complained that Williams’ own “Memoirs” had done him a disservice, and suggested that a book should be written about Williams’ work in the theatre, whereupon the playwright said, “Baby, you write it!” In January of 1979, Williams instructed his then agent, the late Bill Barnes, to represent Leverich. And subsequently Williams decided that Leverich should be his biographer—a task Leverich accepted. In 1984, shortly after Williams died, Charles Carroll—who, as the personal representative of the Southeast Banks of Florida, was the sole executor of Williams’ estate until the will was probated, in June of 1988—reconfirmed Leverich as Williams’ official biographer.

Leverich worked on his first volume in ten years of relative tranquillity, though the manuscript of “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee” was as peripatetic as its subject, moving from the bankrupt publishing firm of Congdon & Weed to William Morrow, and finally landing, in 1990, at Grove Weidenfeld, where it was scheduled for the 1991 fall list. By mid-1988, however, Williams’ will had come out of probate; Maria and Eastman had become the co-trustees, and Maria ascended to her self-proclaimed role of Williams’ literary guardian. She took to it with a vengeful enthusiasm reminiscent of her overhaul of Wilbury once the Dowager had died and Maria had installed herself, her children, and her two pugs at the estate. (“BANG BANG BANG, and out like stout go the following,” she had written gleefully to Williams about firing the cook, the butler, the pantry boy, and the chambermaid.) Like Mrs. Goforth in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” (1963), Maria consigned anyone who wouldn’t do her bidding to “the oubliette”—that place in medieval times where, Williams wrote, “people were put for keeps to be forgotten.” She set out to retroactively deny Leverich permission to publish, on the ground that Williams’ two letters of authorization did not specifically say that Leverich could quote from correspondence and journals. Leverich contended that he had indeed obtained the required approval from the Southeast Banks of Florida, and had proceeded in good faith since then, but Maria dismissed Leverich’s work as just another “pirate book.” She took the matter up with Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart and an appraiser of literary archives, who had been hired by Audrey Wood in the sixties to catalogue and appraise Williams’ papers, and had resumed the task after Williams’ death. In a letter Maria upbraided Brown for helping Leverich and assured him that Leverich would never be the authorized biographer. Brown’s response was brusque. “Yes,” he wrote to Maria, about assisting Leverich. “I first did so for five years prior to Tennessee’s death because Tennessee asked me to do so.”

Maria continued her attempts to scupper Leverich’s biography. Williams’ will stipulates that “all my papers shall be available to such persons writing my biography of whom my Executors and/or Trustees shall have approved.” But Maria convinced Leverich that she had the authority to rescind the executor’s decision to appoint him as biographer. In a vain effort to prove the quality of his work and obtain the estate’s assurance that there would be no costly legal challenge to his right to publish, Leverich asked several eminent literary and theatrical figures to read the manuscript. One of them was Arthur Miller, who wrote, “It is plainly a work of distinction . . . with a narrative flow of its own. I think it will be a great service to Williams’s reputation and among other things may bring more of the young to an appreciation of his achievement and his profoundly idealistic attitude toward humanity.” As for Grove, its lawyer thought that Leverich had a strong case, but the company was not prepared to take on a potentially expensive crusade against the quixotic Lady St. Just. At the end of 1990, Grove dropped plans to publish the book until Leverich could secure recognition from the estate of his prior authorizations, or until Rose Williams died and the trust was dissolved.

Maria pleaded innocence. In another letter to Brown, she laid the responsibility for the estate’s hard line on James Laughlin’s judgment. Leverich had submitted an early, unedited draft to Laughlin for comment, but Laughlin had returned the manuscript in the spring of 1989, explaining that he had been unable to read it because he was coping with fire damage to his Connecticut home. He added, however, that he didn’t think it would “fit into Maria’s plans,” because “she wants something far shorter and with a different slant.” Subsequently, Laughlin wrote to the estate’s lawyer:

I am writing to confirm that Lyle Leverich submitted his Williams manuscript to me for my opinion of its quality as an authorized biography.

I admired the depth of its research but did not feel that the book had the literary qualities requisite for designation as an authorized biography of Tennessee Williams.

What had happened? Brown, who knew both Leverich and Laughlin well, wanted to know. “As I recall,” he wrote Laughlin on June 27, 1990, “Lyle submitted his early unedited draft to you for general comment, not as a screening process for Maria and the estate to accept or reject Lyle’s work as ‘authorized.’ Further, I do not recall your saying at any time during those occasions when the two of us discussed Lyle and his manuscript that you had concluded that his biography did not ‘warrant’ authorization.” Brown got his explanation from Laughlin in a handwritten postcard, postmarked July 5th: “The answer is spelled blackmail. Sorry!”

Maria had played her ace. As holder of the copyrights, she could always move future Williams books to another publisher and, coincidentally, block Laughlin’s plan to publish a volume of Williams’ letters to him. (In the end, she worked out a deal with Laughlin insuring that his book would come out well after hers.) In May of 1992, Laughlin wrote to Leverich, “I must remain friends with the estate because we have business to do with them, but I don’t like the censorship bit at all.”

Others, including Gore Vidal, lobbied Maria on behalf of Leverich and academic freedom. Vidal says, “I’ve denounced her. I’ve bawled her out. She knew (a) that he was very thorough and (b) that he was onto the abortion thing. And I said, ‘Everybody has abortions, for chrissake. What’s the big deal? It’s not as though you’re in line to be Queen of England, and this might be bad P.R. You’re just an actress—actresses go in for that sort of thing.’ ” Leverich, in fact, wrote to Maria offering to “submit for your review and comment” such sensitive material as he’d uncovered. She never replied. Although Maria rightly railed against the misinformation and shoddy scholarship in much other writing about Williams, she went to her grave with Leverich’s project stymied. “Maria wreaked havoc on this man’s life,” Brown says. “It’s a real moral crime.”

“I feel a sadness,” the seventy-four-year-old Leverich told me just after Maria died. “Tennessee gave Maria an opportunity to make friends around the world, and she made so many enemies.”

The English actress Sheila Gish became a particularly aggrieved enemy in 1983, when Maria, acting with an authority that was spurious, tried to stop her from starring in a production of “Streetcar” at the Greenwich Theatre, in London. Williams had been enthusiastic about having the highly regarded actress play Blanche. “You’ll be marvellous in it,” he wrote Gish on February 26, 1982, adding ruefully, “For me, time is running out and I’m almost glad that it is.” A few months after Tennessee’s time had indeed run out, Maria was threatening to close down the play and ruin the theatre because of Gish, whom she said Williams disliked as an actress. But Gish’s name was stipulated in the contract that allowed the theatre to do the play, and, because Maria’s co-trusteeship hadn’t yet come into existence, the theatre’s director, Alan Strachan, called Maria’s bluff. The production went ahead and moved with great acclaim to the Mermaid Theatre. Gish’s success would be her downfall. She later found herself stonewalled from starring roles in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “The Glass Menagerie,” and “The Night of the Iguana.” She talked to Equity and to her lawyer about taking legal action against what she calls Lady St. Just’s “personal McCarthyism,” and enlisted such friends as Sir Alec Guinness, the director John Dexter, and the playwright Martin Sherman to plead her case with Maria. She got nowhere. “I did go through some very, very bad times over this,” Gish says. “When you find something that you can really do—and do better than anybody else around—it’s like saying to Ian McKellen, ‘Sorry, luv. You can’t do any more Shakespeare.’ ” News of Maria’s death reached Gish in the South of France. “I hardly believed it,” she says. “I got very drunk the next night with an enormous, enormous sense of relief, because she’d been someone I’d lived with for ten years. I hadn’t realized how heavy the weight of her had been.”

When Jeanne Newlin, the curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, arrived at Wilbury in August of 1984, Maria was distraught. Williams was dead. Lord Peter was about to be hospitalized. Her mind was not on the Williams estate, but Newlin had come to discuss the handling of the manuscripts and encouraged her to attend an estate meeting in October. Maria had played a large part in getting Williams to sign a codicil to his will withdrawing the bequest of his papers to the University of the South—the alma mater of his beloved grandfather Walter Dakin, in whose name a literary fund was to be established—and giving them to Harvard. (Behind closed doors, this legal hornet’s nest was resolved with the University of the South receiving the assets of the trust—including the earnings of the published works—and Harvard getting clear title to the manuscripts.) Lyle Leverich had been in New Orleans with Williams when Maria called him about the will. “ ‘Tell her I’m asleep,’ ” he recalls Williams saying to his companion. “Then he turned to me and said, ‘They want me to change my will.’ Those were exactly his words. He mumbled something about not wanting to do it. He shook his head.” But, under continuing pressure in the last months of his life, Williams signed the codicil, and Newlin wanted Maria to come to America and participate in the management of the Williams estate, although, she remembers, “John Eastman was terribly opposed to having her.”

Eastman was something of a public figure, having negotiated the breakup of the Beatles in the early seventies, and he had an impressive list of rich clients. His sister, Linda, had married Paul McCartney, for whom Eastman now acted. He also represented Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Bowie, Billy Joel, and the Willem de Kooning estate. The Eastman firm (a father-son team) had drawn up Williams’ will, but John had known Williams for only a few years before he died. “He really wasn’t interested in Tennessee,” Newlin says. But, she adds, “I had known Maria. I knew that she was the one who knew Tennessee, and I was beginning to be worried about the material.” The October meeting was postponed when Lord Peter had a relapse, and later in the month he died. Lord Peter’s estate came to four million and sixty-five thousand pounds, the bulk of which was left to his daughters Natasha and Katherine, but his will was immediately contested by his illegitimate offspring, and Maria was strapped. “She did feel desperate after the deaths. She didn’t know what to do,” Newlin recalls. “ ‘Do I stay in Wilbury? Do I have to sell it? I won’t sell it.’ It was just like ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ Chop. Chop. Chop. Coming after you.” The co-trusteeship held out to Maria the promise of money and perhaps some direction in a life that seemed in shards. Newlin pressed her hard to get involved. “And I’ll tell you something,” she says. “It was necessary. A Tennessee Williams person was necessary, who was familiar with the work.”

At the first estate meeting, Maria was demure. “She was a listener,” Charles Carroll says. “But that was probably the only time.” Maria was a mouse studying to be a rat. She was nearly twenty years older than Eastman and had a knowledge of theatre and of Williams. “He doesn’t know anything,” she complained to Paula Laurence when she and Eastman were at odds. Eastman, according to Carroll, who was present at these early business meetings, “tried to appease” Maria. “Maria was the greatest cheerleader Tennessee Williams will ever have,” Eastman says now, but he adds, “Sometimes cheerleaders aren’t so pretty once you get them off the field.”

Even so, Eastman basically paints a picture of a happy and equal collaboration. “I had no trouble working with Maria. I may be the only one who didn’t,” he says. “We just talked over every major decision. She and I both signed every single contract.” To those who worked with the estate, Eastman seemed only too glad to have Maria oversee the literary side of Williams’ affairs. “Eastman is perfectly willing to get out of any aspect which is not going to bring in money, which means the literary aspect of it,” Gore Vidal says. Robert Lantz, who represented the Williams estate between 1985 and 1989, noticed that “in the case of Tennessee’s executors it was very odd. The balance wasn’t kept.”

Indeed, Maria tipped it in her favor. She tried to stop many of the productions that the Southeast Banks of Florida, in the first nine months after Williams’ death, had set up. “She wrote nasty letter after nasty letter,” Carroll says. She balked at Ann-Margret’s being in a cable-TV production of “Streetcar”—a project that had been initiated in Williams’ lifetime. When a Broadway house wanted to call itself the Tennessee Williams, Maria demanded money for the honor. “She got everybody kind of turned off,” Carroll says. “So we ended with nothing.” Rocco Landesman, the head of New York’s Jujamcyn Theatres, also wanted to use Williams’ name for a theatre. He says, “I wanted to name what is now the Walter Kerr Theatre after Tennessee. I called Maria St. Just. She talked quite a lot and listened not at all. The gist of the conversation was that if we’d produce ‘Orpheus Descending’ on Broadway she’d arrange this. Which was too bad, because Tennessee would have had the most beautiful theatre in New York named after him. But I wouldn’t submit to blackmail.”

The bank, before the trust was fully vested with the copyrights, continually reminded Maria that she had no legal right to act as the estate, but Maria dismissed Carroll and his explanations of her function as regally as she would dismiss any servant. While worrying about the depleted funds of the Rose Williams Trust (the grand total of professional fees for administering and litigating the five-million-dollar estate was $1,370,437), Maria rapidly helped diminish them. “Maria kept coming over on the Concorde,” Carroll says. “She would check in at the best hotel, and she’d be there for thirty days. Finally, because of her status, we said we would honor a first-class round-trip ticket from London, and only for those meetings which we called. She didn’t like it, but she did adhere to it after a while.” Maria’s aggrandizing temperament extended to Williams’ property as well. “She took a lot of stuff with her all the time, even things out of the apartment that Tennessee had here in Manhattan Plaza, which he had rarely ever occupied,” Paula Laurence says. “That’s how Maria was. She plundered.” In the summer of 1988, Laurence’s husband, Charles Bowden, found a more congenial sanitarium for Rose. “There were a few bits and pieces of jewelry that Rose had,” Laurence says. “When Rose moved, Maria took them. In her mind, I don’t think it was stealing.” Even unimportant artifacts were treated by Maria as part of her domain. Earlier in her life, Rose had got quite good at drawing and used to hang her work on a kind of clothesline. “Every time Maria went there, she made a clean sweep of them and took them off her,” Laurence says. “She has piles of Rose’s drawings. Why? What was she going to do with them? Tennessee had quite a few paintings here in New York. At one point, she was able to get hold of them. She said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have one of these. You’ll love it.’ Well, they’re at Wilbury. She just took them. But her rationale was that if she didn’t guard these treasures they would fall into the hands of these ‘predators’—as she called the homosexual coterie who surrounded him.”

According to Maria, the moment that she learned of Williams’ death marked the great physical change that dominated the last decade of her life and became a metaphor for it. She was watching the television news with Lord Peter at his sanitarium. “She went to pick up the telephone,” Elaine Dundy, the novelist and the first Mrs. Kenneth Tynan, remembers Maria telling her, “and this incredible pain shot through her arm to her fingers, and the telephone fell from her hand.” From that moment, Maria claimed, her hands were crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. She couldn’t open a door, turn a doorknob, or turn off a spigot. As she did with all the negative elements in her life, Maria chose to ignore the arthritis, but for those last years she was in constant agony. Laurence believes that “arthritis is a disease of control freaks—people who have to manipulate and grasp, and that was all true of Maria.” The onset of the pain coincided with her rise to power as Williams’ literary guardian, and, according to Jeanne Newlin, “The more she got involved, she didn’t want anything distributed to anybody.”

In February of 1984, Williams’ former agent at I.C.M., Bill Barnes—whom Williams had credited with giving his floundering career the kiss of life in the early seventies—invited Maria and James Laughlin to his penthouse to read two Williams journals from the late thirties and early forties, which, Barnes said, Williams had given him out of gratitude for his hard work. Barnes was planning to publish the diaries with Simon & Schuster. Laughlin found the pages “wonderful,” but in a note to Barnes a few days later he added that both he and Maria felt that the book should be published in an understated “literary way.” The two journals, according to Leverich, who had been allowed by Williams to read them, are “the most important of all his journals that I’ve seen. As a mirror of a young artist attempting to seek some artistic level, they are particularly poignant and revealing.” But Barnes had no letter to prove that they were a gift, and in 1985 the estate slapped him with a two-million-dollar suit accusing him of malfeasance, on the ground that handling the diaries was part of his “fiduciary duties” as Williams’ agent and therefore he had no right to sell or possess them. Variety reported the story and made it sound as if Barnes had stolen the journals. “It destroyed him,” Leverich says. “He was never the same after that.”

Possession of the journals wasn’t as important to Maria as suppression of their content. “I don’t think it should be published,” Vidal remembers Maria telling him when he remonstrated with her. “Because, reading it, I am convinced that he was mad. I don’t want the world to think of him as someone insane.” Vidal says, “She really was protecting some sort of image she has of him that she wants the world to have.” Maria, who was now Williams’ widow without a ring, also didn’t want to be perceived in the world as having another demented husband. Although she claimed a victory, the two parties settled out of court, agreeing to split the baby: Barnes got thirty thousand dollars from the Rose Williams Trust for his share of the diaries, which were appraised at sixty thousand dollars.

There was an outstanding issue, however: if the journals were considered part of Tennessee Williams’ papers, then they would go to Harvard, along with his other manuscripts, once the probate period had ended. But the Barnes settlement fudged this question, and, in any case, the trustees were dragging their feet about Williams’ manuscripts. Their argument, and one that was frequently raised by Maria, was that Williams’ papers were “assets” and might need to be sold to boost the Rose Williams Trust. (Rose’s upkeep, according to Charles Bowden, is approximately a quarter of a million dollars a year.) Harvard objected to this, and a court ruled that the objections be partly sustained and that all Williams’ manuscripts—except for the two journals, which were classified as personal property and thus belonged to the trust—be handed over to Harvard outright. Maria was furious.

To someone who has only a hammer, everything is a nail. Because of the court ruling, Maria couldn’t finally control Williams’ physical manuscripts, but she continued to work doggedly to control productions of his plays. In this arena, she was a force of nature. “Either you let her in or you dealt with chaos,” says Elizabeth McCann, the American co-producer of Sir Peter Hall’s successful revival of “Orpheus Descending,” in 1989. Hall, who staged the first English productions of “Camino Real” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” was an old friend of both Williams and Maria. For the New York production of “Orpheus,” he and Vanessa Redgrave decided to intensify the erotic charge between Lady and Val, by letting Redgrave drop her kimono and appear naked in the half-light as Lady goes behind the curtain to make love to Val for the first time. Maria strongly objected, on the ground that “Tennessee would never have liked it.” Hall recalls, “She said, ‘You’ve simply got to cut it.’ I said, ‘I won’t. You gonna take the rights away? You gonna close the play down because I have this moment? You simply can’t.’ In the end, she gave way.” Williams’ will stipulated that not one word of his plays could be changed, but Maria was prepared to ignore the will in order to kiss the hem of theatrical power. The most courtly and influential English directors—Hall and Richard Eyre and Harold Pinter—got their way. “Certainly Richard and I were favored,” Hall says. “Both of us were pushing Maria into allowing the widest possible playing of Tennessee.” Maria did not want Julie Walters in Hall’s version of “The Rose Tattoo”; did not like Lindsay Duncan, who won the Evening Standard’s Best Actress Award for her Maggie in Howard Davies’ version of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”; and did not even know of Alfred Molina, the fine actor whom Eyre cast in his successful revival of “The Night of the Iguana,” or of Jessica Lange, who played Blanche in Gregory Mosher’s 1992 Broadway revival of “Streetcar.” Eyre and Hall knew how to handle her. “She just longed to be part of the group,” Eyre says. “She longed to sit around rehearsals and drink coffee and gossip in the breaks and tell stories about Tennessee.” But younger directors who had neither the social cachet nor the charm to keep her in her place were in for heavy weather. Simon Curtis, the head of BBC television drama, tried to persuade Maria to let him produce a film script that Williams had written, called “Stopped Rocking.” Curtis says, “She pretended an awful lot. ‘Who’s going to write the screenplay?’ she said to me. ‘It is a screenplay,’ I said.”

Howard Davies, whose production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in 1988, was the most astute of the recent revivals, refused to charm Maria, and, despite his expert adaptation, which later had a well-received Broadway run, was prohibited by Maria from ever doing another Williams play. She also scotched a deal to film the Broadway version for television. Davies, whose production of “Cat” amalgamated various versions of the play, says, “I couldn’t bear the thought of getting into a dialogue with her about anything. She was just all over the place, absolutely scattered.” Davies told Maria he needed to make minor changes, mainly in the tricky third act. “In fact, what I did was a major, major compilation of whatever I could get,” Davies says. “Then I sent it to her, having led her to believe—I mean I did lie and I did cheat—that they were minimal changes.” Maria approved the adaptation. “I can only assume she didn’t read it,” Davies says. And when Maria saw one of the London previews she was thrilled. “She was jumping up and down with joy, as if, somehow, through acting and directing I’d made it work,” says Davies, who was proud of the seamlessness of his changes. But by opening night Maria had read the original and was incensed. “She accused me of being a cheat and a liar,” Davies says. “I said, ‘Yes, but it works. You liked it last week, so what you’re not liking about it now is that you couldn’t spot the difference.’ ”

When “Cat” opened in New York, starring Kathleen Turner as Maggie, Maria insisted on attending rehearsals. Davies refused to have her. “I said, ‘If you set one foot inside this theatre, I will ask my cast to leave and I certainly will leave,’ ” Davies recalls. Inevitably, Maria tried to go behind his back and give notes to Turner herself. Turner would have none of it, Davies says. “I could hear her down the corridor; it was something like ‘Get that woman out of my room and make sure she stays out!’ ”

Gregory Mosher also turned Maria out of his “Streetcar” rehearsals. He recalls, “I was on the stairs, and I heard Maria giving very specific notes to Jessica Lange—trivial stuff about the gestures and the laugh. She came out, and I said, ‘Maria, why are you giving notes?’ She said, ‘I’m not.’ ‘Well, no, I’m sorry. I heard you. I was sitting right here. You were giving notes.’ She said, ‘You can’t speak to me in that way!’ I said, ‘I’m not speaking to you in any way at all. You know you’re not supposed to be talking to the actors.’ She said—she started screaming in the way she does—‘I will not be spoken to, I will not be spoken to in that way. I’m going back to England!’ And she went back to England.”

Mosher had been the artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and of the Lincoln Center Theatre, and was the original director of all the major plays of David Mamet, but to Maria, who had no knowledge of the American theatre scene, he was a nonentity. Maria was also unaware that there were at least three different published texts of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” “You couldn’t win,” Mosher says. “If you went with the regulation text, she would say, ‘Well, that’s not what Marlon said.’ But if you used the Dramatists Play Service version she would say, ‘That’s not what Tennessee wrote.’ Kazan made hundreds of changes in the script—just rewrote lines. Why is that version still out there?” Mosher only gradually began to make the connection between the sloppiness that surrounded Williams’ literary affairs and Maria. “I didn’t put her together with the fact that you still can’t tell which is the definitive edition of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ ” he says. “Or with the fact that ‘A House Not Meant to Stand’ in its full-length form is not published and is not produced in New York. How is that possible? Well, because she doesn’t like it, quote unquote. She wouldn’t let me do the play at Lincoln Center. She said, ‘The play is not doable.’ I said, ‘You didn’t even see it. How do you know if it’s doable or not?’ She said, ‘It’s a bad play.’ I said, ‘It’s a good play, actually. It’s not “Streetcar,” but it’s a good play.’ ”

Mosher complains that Maria assumed the role of the police in dealing with the cast—that she would say to the actors, “Accents don’t matter. Tennessee told me.” Mosher explains, “ ‘The accent doesn’t matter,’ always, a hundred per cent of the time, means ‘You’re never going to get it, so stop worrying.’ It never means the accent doesn’t matter. You would just be so touched by this woman’s innocence.” Maria even brought a photograph of Wilbury to a rehearsal and told the cast that it was the house that had given Williams the notion of Belle Reve—a factual tidbit that boggled the imagination, since the play was written in 1945–46 and she didn’t meet Williams until 1948. To her consternation, the cast laughed.

One ongoing battle was the color of Blanche’s peignoir, which Williams describes in his stage directions as scarlet, but which Maria insisted should be pale pink. “I said, ‘No, it’s dark red. That’s the whole point of this production,’ ” Mosher recalls. “And she said, ‘No, you’re just wrong. You’re just wrong!’ I said, ‘Maria, all I know is what I read.’ She said, ‘Well, excuse me. I know it sounds immodest to say this, but who are you? And this is, after all, the best American play of the twentieth century.’ And I realized that she thinks she wrote it. What else could ‘I know it sounds immodest’ mean? It’s the widow problem.”

In order to protect the actors and himself from the weight of the play’s legend, Mosher banned all discussion of Kazan’s original production and of Brando’s performance. But Alec Baldwin, who played Stanley, says that Maria took to finagling rides uptown with him in order to give him notes. “The No. 1 thing you strive for in acting is to be unself-conscious,” Baldwin says. “She made everybody self-conscious.” Baldwin got Mosher to call her off, but before the show he’d get on the loudspeaker for the cast’s amusement: “Attention, everyone. This is Maria. May I have your attention, please!” Baldwin mimics Maria’s grandness with a surprisingly accurate English inflection. “I’m going to be having champagne and strawberries in Jessica’s dressing room after the performance tonight. And please, everyone, try to pick up the pace. Jessica, darling, please louder, darling. You can’t be heard past the fourth row. And Alec, darling, try to be more sexy if you can. And please join me for champagne and strawberries afterward. I love you all.” Baldwin’s prank also mocked the vacuity of Maria’s view of the play. For all her passion about Williams’ work, she had no informed perspective. “She had no view of Tennessee,” Mosher says. “You know that theatre joke about the guy who gets cast in the original production of ‘Streetcar’ and he writes home to his mother and says, ‘So I’m in this wonderful play about a doctor who comes to save a woman’? That’s her view. That Tennessee was a man for whom the most important thing in his life was that he loved her. . . . But it was about her glorification, not his. I would accept her behavior if Tennessee Williams were an infinitely more celebrated person in the culture, but he’s not.”

At the finale of “This Is (An Entertainment),” Williams’ spokesman, the General, offers an affectionate envoi to the Countess (and to Maria): “My last request is a last command. Give the lady safe passage through the mountains! Will you? For old times’ sake?” In a sense, Williams’ will offered Maria the safe harbor in life that the play hoped for in make-believe. But in the fifteen years between the play’s writing and his death, Williams’ relationship with Maria had continued to decline. Williams’ last, garbled story, “The Negative,” written in November of 1982, tells of a has-been poet who can’t finish his poem and is about to be sent to a nursing home. He gets a phone call from the mysterious Lady Mona, who seems to know all his difficulties, and wants to be his muse. They meet in a dark café. Lady Mona wears a black veil. The poet lifts the veil and is horrified by the woman’s rapacious eyes, and he throws himself into the Thames. “He knew that she had exaggerated and exploited the level of their friendship beyond all recognition,” Bruce Smith says, noting that at the end of Williams’ life “he was weaning himself away from her. There were unopened letters from her even when I was around there and she was back in London. He was emotionally through with her. He said to me, ‘I don’t know why she bothers to come over here for these openings because she isn’t needed and she really isn’t wanted.’ ”

Mitch Douglas confirms Williams’ courtly dismissal of Lady St. Just. “Maria was very much a presence,” he recalls of the rehearsals for Williams’ last Broadway play, “Clothes for a Summer Hotel.” “There were lots of notes, and, if I may respectfully say so, she was getting in the way. Tennessee would smile and be very nice to her and then turn around to the people at hand and say, ‘Well, you know, she really doesn’t understand this kind of theatre.’ ” According to Charles Carroll, Williams was considering striking Maria’s assignment as a co-trustee from his will, but “he was a procrastinator, and he never got it done.” And Elizabeth McCann says that Maria “wasn’t really interested in the scholarship or the longevity of Williams for the future. She was only interested in what was in it for her. Now. This moment.” McCann attended Maria’s funeral, where, at the end, following Russian Orthodox custom, mourners kissed the corpse. “I remember thinking as I watched these people parade up to kiss the corpse that there was no way I could approach Maria St. Just even in death,” McCann says. “I’d had my last run-in as far I was concerned. ‘Thank you a lot, Maria, not this trip.’ She was a pistol.”

Tennessee Williams photographed by Richard Avedon in New York City, August 26, 1969.

If Maria didn’t kill the thing she loved, which was Williams’ art, she unwittingly wounded it. Williams’ great labor—he wrote from four to eight hours a day for a good forty years—is a national treasure, and one of the century’s great chronicles of the romance and the barbarity of individualism. Its value as a financial asset has been honored by the estate, but its value as an intellectual asset, as a defining part of our century’s sense of itself, has been overseen haphazardly. Now that John Eastman alone has the responsibility, common sense has begun to prevail. The estate has lifted Maria’s censure and given New Directions permission to publish “Something Cloudy, Something Clear”; and just last month negotiations with Lyle Leverich were concluded that will allow his two-part biography to proceed to publication. “There’s less here than meets the eye,” Eastman says. “It’s a happy ending.”

Perhaps it will be, but there’s also more to it than meets the eye. Williams belongs to the world, not to the lawyers, and it behooves the estate to set up a procedure whereby accredited writers, academics, and theatre artists can make reasonable use of Williams’ published and unpublished papers. The conversation between our greatest playwright and the world still languishes in misinformation. “It’s going to take over two generations of scholars to ascertain the significance of the papers he held at the end of his life,” Jeanne Newlin says. “And that work must be begun.” Meanwhile, brazen and bumptious to the end, Lady Maria St. Just, who helped create this quagmire, rests peacefully at Wilbury: buried not with the Grenfell clan, with whom she was always at war, but with those loved ones who obeyed her every whim and believed her every word—her dogs. ♦

John Lahr has been the senior drama critic for The New Yorker since October, 1992.